In 1954, Charlotte DeCroes stood in line with her fellow second graders in Kingsport, Tennessee and received the polio vaccine. Her Tennessee hometown was one of the test sites for what was then the largest and most significant clinical trial in the history of medicine. By the end of 1953, there were 35,968 reported polio …Read More

In an effort to help prepare this year’s crop of new medical students for the future challenges of keeping true to the spirit of the Hippocratic Oath – to first do no harm ‑ Stanford’s School of Medicine held a new discussion session during orientation. In between learning about housing and schedules and all the …Read More

Stanford oncologist Charlotte Jacobs, MD, loved reading biographies as a child. But it wasn’t until years later, while on sabbatical at Stanford, that she decided to take a creative writing course and begin cultivating a second career as a biographer. Her first biography, Henry Kaplan and the Story of Hodgkin’s Disease, was published in 2010 …Read More

A recent blog post on Somatosphere sparked my interest in the role that comics can play in the study and delivery of health care, an emerging field called “graphic medicine.” The term was coined by UK-based Ian Williams, MD, who is an artist and independent humanities scholar as well as a physician. He recently launched …Read More

When I saw that an event called “Medicine Around the World: Healing from a Global Perspective” was taking place on campus, I thought it would be right up my alley as a medical anthropologist. The event, sponsored by Stanford’s Medicine and the Muse program and the Pegasus Physician Writers group, was a reading in which physicians shared some beautiful pieces …Read More

“How many of you know what intersex is?” surgeon and author Ilene Wong, MD, (who did her residency at Stanford and writes under the pen name I.W. Gregorio) asked an audience of medical students, doctors and community members at a recent panel discussion on the topic on Stanford’s campus. Since we’d gathered at the event, which …Read More

For many people, the topic of human anatomy evokes feelings of both marvel and dismay. The workings of the body may be a wonder to behold, but their intricacies can be a pain to sort out, remember and explain. To make human anatomy easier to learn and understand, Bruce Ian Meader, an associate professor at the Rochester …Read More

This spring, four Stanford medical students wrote a children’s book, Stanford Storytellers, which uses imagination to help children understand and feel comfortable in the hospital. Authors Afaaf Shakir, Michael Nedelman, Karen Hong, and Zahra Sayyid, along with illustrator Emma Steinkellner, a Stanford undergraduate, came together through a call for interested Stanford Medicine students to collaborate on a children’s book in honor of …Read More

The Doctor and Mr. Dylan is a murder mystery, a medical puzzler and a tale about love and parenting. And, it stars Bob Dylan, who may, or may not be, the real Bob Dylan. It’s also the debut novel by Rick Novak, MD, an adjunct clinical associate professor of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine at …Read More

The annual Medicine & the Muse symposium is one of senior associate dean Charles Prober’s favorite events of the year, and now it’s one of mine too. Prober, MD, the senior associate dean of medical education, kicked off the evening with introduction of this year’s theme, “transformation and triumph.” It’s a talent show Stanford Medicine …Read More